Industrial companies innovate better and quicker with Open Innovation

30 Jan 2015

With 50 years of experience in interconnect technologies, Axon’ Cable has a longstanding tradition of innovation.  The 5DCnium is an excellent opportunity for our clients to take advantage  of the concept of Open Innovation.

The term “open innovation” was first used in the title of a book “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology”, published in 2003 by Professor Henry CHESBROUGH, Professor at the University of California.

Procter and Gamble, who were looking for a more efficient model of innovation, realised that 35% of its new products came from external innovations. In 2006, they renamed the R&D department in “C&D” for “Connect and Develop”, and structured it in order to better integrate open innovations.
And in 2008, the CEO, A.G. LAFLEY, published a remarkable book, “The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation”, in collaboration with Ram CHARAN, a business consultant, which lays out this new process.
Since then, a lot of books have been published about methods and advantages of Open Innovation. For example in August 2014, in a book simply entitled “Open Innovation”, the authors, M. Martin DUVAL, a business consultant and M. Klaus-Peter SPEIDEL, an educator, structured open innovation into 7 categories.

On 6 January 2015, TOYOTA gave a fine demonstration of category n°5: “Using Open Data”. It placed at the disposal of all manufacturers their 5680 patents on hydrogen engines, though they had only just begun commercialising in Japan their first car with this technology in December 2014, the sedan MIRAI (50K€ unit price): “the world’s cleanest car”.
Obviously, TOYOTA’s approach is, by placing their patents in Open Innovation format, to accelerate the acceptance of the hydrogen car on the market and, consequently, accelerate its own sales, while continuing their own research to keep their technical advance.

Whilst we are using the recognised term Open Innovation, we will focus on a 8th category: “enabling technologies"* (KETs “key enabling technologies) a term which seems to have appeared in a report titled “The 100 technologies of the future”, published in November 1995 by the then French Minister for Research. This report highlighted a group of 26 enabling technologies, including interconnect technology. Europe, with its Programme Horizon 2020, is also giving enabling technologies top priority.

* An enabling technology is an invention or innovation that can be applied to drive radical change in the capabilities of a user or culture. Enabling technologies are characterized by rapid development of subsequent derivative technologies, often in diverse fields